Your child watches a lot of TV and spends hours texting and talking on the phone.

The result: Your child is on the chubby side, or, to be more blunt, obese.

What's a parent to do?

That was one of the questions answered Thursday as experts discussed "Childhood Obesity in Long Beach," a program sponsored by the Children's Clinic as part of national Health Center Week at Cesar Chavez Elementary School on Long Beach's west side.

The panel (which I moderated) included: Dr. Elisa Nicholas, CEO of the Children's Clinic; Michelle Fino, wellness coordinator for the city of Long Beach; Chef Paul Buchanan, owner of Primal Alchemy; Allan Crawford, bicycle coordinator for Big Long Beach; and Danielle DeRuiter-Williams, policy analyst for the California Center for Public Health Advocacy.

When she started practicing pediatrics 25 years ago, Nicholas said the main concern affecting children was infectious diseases such as meningitis.

"Childhood obesity was not something we worried about then," she said.

But childhood obesity has grown into a problem of epidemic proportions, and now Long Beach needs to tackle this problem together, she said.

Here's a few startling statistics:

Long Beach has the highest rate of obese and overweight 2- to 5-year-olds in all of California (40 percent).

Almost half of all fifth-, seventh- and ninth-graders in the Long Beach Unified School District are obese or overweight, according to LBUSD.

Sixty-five percent of ninth-graders in Long Beach said they drank one or more sodas in the last 24 hours, according to the California Healthy Kids Survey in 2008-2009.

Beatriz Sosa-Prado, a graduate student research fellow at the CSULB Center for Latino Community, asked the panelists how they could help parents combat the problem of unhealthy - but enormously popular - food and beverages.

Buchanan, the chef, said he is working to reach kids at the fourth- and fifth-grade levels when they haven't gotten totally set in their sweet-tooth ways.

"These kids learn about healthy food and take that message home and help their parents make better food decisions," he said.

Bike Long Beach's Crawford said parents should be stronger role models by walking more and biking more. DeRuiter-Williams said she rides her bike to work, which is two miles away, every day.

Nicholas said the Children's Clinic tries to educate the entire family.

"We don't ask parents if they want fat children," she said. "We ask them if they want healthy children. That works better."

She urged parents to do as many things together as possible, such as eating good food and walking.

Other tips from Nicholas:

"Eat food your great-grandmother would have eaten, real food."

"Don't eat too much of anything. Eat off small plates. Eat portions no bigger than your fist." She said you can lose 10 pounds a year simply by cutting out one soda a day.